Writer/ director Graham Cantwell told David Hennessy about his film Who We Love that deals with themes of sexuality and bullying and screens as part of IFTUK’s Pride festival this week. Irish Film & TV UK (IFTUK) host it’s first Pride film festival. Hosted in partnership with the London LGBTQ Network, the Century Club and Peccadillo Pictures, the event is free to attend and will be held at the Century Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. The festival programme includes Graham Cantwell’s Who We Love, the story of a school girl coming to terms with her sexuality amidst the merciless bullying of her peers. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director and Peccadillo Pictures Founder & Managing Director Tom Abell, hosted by Irish Actor, Broadcaster & Presenter, Derek Murphy. We chatted to the film’s writer/ director Graham Cantwell ahead of the festival. Graham is well known for directing Anton which was nominated for three IFTA awards. His other feature films include the London- set The Callback Queen. Prior to this his short film A Dublin Story was shortlisted for Academy Award nomination having picked up numerous film festival awards. How does it feel to be bringing the film over for this special pride event? “It’s brilliant. “Every chance you get to put a film out there, to get it out in front of people is fantastic. “And especially given it’s where I lived for such a long time, London it’s lovely to be going back with this film. “The film was a very, very long time in the making, and it’s been a labour of love getting it onto screens. “It’s an important film to me. “It’s an important film given the message that’s in it, and given the kind of film that it is. “It’s really nice to be able to go back to London and to screen it there and to screen it during Pride. “It means a lot.” You say it’s been a long time coming. How did the film start? Was there something that inspired you to make it? “It actually started out as a short film. “A long time ago I made a short film called Lily. “Again, I wanted to tell a story about bullying. “I work a lot with young people and I could see that there was a lot of it going on back then. “I had been bullied when I was a kid and I wanted to make something that would talk to young people who were being bullied to let them know it will get better, to not worry and to ‘find your tribe’, as we say in the film. “I made this short film with no plans for it to go any further than just it being a short film and it did really well for us. “It won awards. “It was nominated for an IFTA and a lot of young people responded quite well to it. “Myself and Alan Fitzpatrick, the producer, figured, ‘If we can reach that many people with a short film, imagine how many more people we could reach if we made a feature film along the same lines…’ “So we set about turning it into a script for a feature. “And then what happened then was we filmed for four weeks and we went into an edit. “We did a rough cut, we went back to do our reshoots and our pick ups and.. COVID happened, shut us down for a year so we had to sit on the film for a year. “Then when they tentatively opened up the world again, we went back filming under very restrictive conditions and we had another week or so of filming a year later to try and patch the film together, so it was a unique kind of challenge in that respect.” It must have been so frustrating if you had the bulk of it filmed but had to wait so long to get it finished.. “I’d say it was probably about 80% there but we couldn’t release it. “There was stuff that we either didn’t have time to get or stuff that narratively we needed to fix, we knew we had to go back out and shoot. “But it gave us a year’s worth of time to think about it, to sit down and look at what we had and think about, ‘How could it be better?’ “It was very, very challenging but at the same time, it did give us that time and that’s one commodity that you very rarely have in the film industry, time.” What has the reaction to the film been like? “It’s been great. “It got a great critical reception. “The Irish press particularly loved it and thought it was great but for me, it’s the personal messages that you get that are the real reward. “When you hear from people who either are going through something similar and it made them feel better, or from people who maybe have young queer people in their lives who didn’t know how bad it was and it opened up their awareness, that’s kind of as compelling and as important to me: That it reaches people who are floundering a bit. “They don’t know what’s going on with their kids or with the young people in their lives and then when they see this, it kind of makes a bit more sense to them. “They can see it in a different light. “I’ve had quite a few responses in that regard where people have come back and said, ‘I didn’t know, I just didn’t know’. “And what’s been really lovely is where we hear that people from different generations have been able to use the film as a conversation starter where they can talk about it and it allows them to talk about their own thing, their own lives, their own situation through the vehicle of the film, that’s really nice to hear.” Ireland became the first country to vote for same sex marriage but that does not mean homophobia doesn’t exist.. “Yeah and it’s a different world from to the world that I would have grown up in or most of the people involved in: All this social media, the internet, anonymity online, it’s a whole new way to bully. “It’s a different world in there than it is out here and sometimes it can be a lot scarier, it can be a lot tougher. “It’s never going to go away: Homophobia, bullying. It’s never going to go away but you can make people aware of it. “There’s a line in the film where it says, ‘Words can be weapons’. “Kids use words as weapons against each other but the counter measures to those weapons are also words, people talking about it, people talking with their peers, with older people who they trust, and older people talking to the younger people in their lives. Talking about it is what resolves it. “That’s what we were trying to do with the film is give people a platform, give them a way to talk about it, give them a way to start a conversation because that’s where healing and fixing problems begins.” That’s the importance of the storyline of Simon (Dean Quinn) and his father (Jimmy Smallhorne) who wants him to hide who is as in his mind that’s safer, I was thinking maybe someone could see themselves in that.. “Yeah, and that’s another thing. “At film festivals and screenings and in cinemas and even in correspondence, I’ve had quite a few conversations with parents who have said, ‘That touched a nerve’. “Because there’s the need to protect versus the need to allow your kids to go out into the world and find their own way. “That’s a delicate balance and it’s the difficulty in being a parent, how much of one or how much of the other do you allow or do you impose and for Simon in the film, his dad Fran is only motivated by a desire to protect but that desire to protect really comes from a place of fear and that’s where Oonagh tries to challenge him on that and says, ‘You gotta let him be himself. You gotta let him find his own way’. “And again it’s about creating spaces where young people can do that, creating spaces and creating environments where young people can do that without the fear that they’ll be exploited, without the fear that they’ll be harmed. “That’s the challenge and the world that we’re in at the moment, even since the film was made, has gotten darker. It’s gotten more challenging. “The right wing are on the up and they’re being enabled by people at the top with the kind of rhetoric that they’re allowing, bigotry and hatred and homophobia is being given a license to exist. “For us the challenge is how do you counteract that. “It’s queer kids, it’s trans kids, it’s all of it- They deserve a place in the world. “They have the right to exist and to be themselves but they don’t know that so they need people who are maybe older than them or in a position of authority to turn around and tell them, ‘Demand this. Expect it and demand it because it’s your right’. “The only thing you can do is keep shouting about it, keep raising your voice and also keep talking to the young people involved and let them know they have a voice but also they have advocates.” The film could easily have focused on a boy being bullied for being gay. Did featuring a girl being bullied subvert things a little by making it more shocking to see girls being so cruel? “Well when we made the short film, it initially started out as a male character. “It was coming from my own experiences being bullied in school and also a friend of mine Eamonn Farrell had talked during the referendum about having similar experiences. “It was kind of based on his story, my story, other stories I’d heard from people. “Then I heard about this initiative in Hollywood. “Geena Davis was going to all the writers she knew and asking them to comb through their scripts and everywhere they had a male character consider could it be female. “And it kind of made me think, ‘Well, why not?’ “And I looked at it in that respect and it made more sense. “It allowed me to explore the father-daughter dynamic and it also highlighted, as you say, the fact that bullying among young girls can be quite vicious. “And to illustrate the point one of the producers on the short was an older guy and when we were having a script meeting early on he said, ‘This doesn’t happen’. “And I said, ‘What?’ “And he said, ‘Physical violence. Girls use words, they don’t use their fists’. “And all the women in the room laughed at him. “They were like, ‘Yeah, really?’ “It took seconds. “I pulled up a search online of girls bullying and he could see it in front of his face then, some vicious physical attacks that were captured on phones. “It is something that happens, happens a lot and every time I talk to groups of young people after we screen the film we ask that question, ‘Is it as prevalent as we’ve heard? Is it as common as we’ve heard? Is it a thing?’ “And they all say yeah. “Physical violence among young women is on the rise and it is definitely a thing and a lot of young people live in fear of it. “It was one of the things we wanted to highlight, one of the things we wanted to include in the film. “One of our reviews said that the film Who We Love is a lot angrier than its contemporaries and at first I kind of thought, ‘Is it?’ “But then I realised, ‘No, it is’. “Because I was angry when I was writing it, I was angry when I was making it. “I was angry that this has been allowed to happen and I want the film to breed that anger. “I want people to be angry at how bad it can be for young people, how there is an environment there that we have allowed to fester, that we have allowed to happen and it’s our job, as older people, to facilitate young people addressing that and creating a different dynamic and a different world and an environment in which they themselves and their peers can see how bad that is and why it’s wrong and address it and make amends.” Clara Harte stars as Lily with the other lead roles being Dean Quinn as best friend Simon and Venetia Bowe as bully Violet. However the film is also blessed by a great supporting cast that includes well known faces like Paul Ronan, Aisling O’Neill, Geraldine McAlinden, Jimmy SMallhorne, Norma Sheahan and Barry John Kinsella. There are also rising stars such as Danielle Galligan, Ryan Lincoln and Niamh McCormack. You must have great trust when you had such a great supporting cast… “It’s always a balance. “When you’re making a film about school kids, you’re going to have a young cast and because of their age, they’re not going to be as experienced but what we tried to do with this film was balance it out where we would bring in very experienced, very talented, very good actors who knew what they were doing and who were also very supportive of the younger actors who are coming through. “The biggest challenge when looking for young actors is to find the right actor for the right role. “Clara, who plays Lily, auditioned for the short film and the minute I saw her self tape for it I went, ‘That’s her. That’s the girl’. “There was something different about her. “There was a vulnerability about her but also kind of a quiet confidence. “And you can see the same thing with Danielle Galligan. “She came in and read for the character of Naomi, and she hadn’t done Shadow and Bone or anything like that before we made Who We Love but you could see she was gonna be a big star. “It’s amazing to watch these young actors flourish and go out into the world. “But when you’re the filmmaker putting this cast together, what you try to do is to get these veteran actors who will come in and provide stability and security and confidence for me and confidence for the other young actors around them to be able to do what they need to do.” I’m sure they were also supportive of the film’s message.. “Yeah, absolutely, 100%. “There are actors in there who are from the queer community themselves, who are very supportive of the message and would have been very helpful in the lead up to filming. “Myself and Katie (McNeice, co- writer) have our own singular perspectives on the story and what we want it to be and then an actor will come in and they’ll talk specifically from their character’s point of view, ‘How do we make this authentic? How do we make it real? How do we make it sing? And how do they interact with the younger actors? And how do they give them license to do the same thing?’ “It’s much more collaborative when you have that level of trust with actors and when you have that level of confidence that they will do something good with the words you’re giving them and you know that they will do something unique and different.” Who We Love screens at The Century Club 6.30pm on Wednesday 2 July. IFTUK’s Pride Festival runs 2- 4 July. To book your tickets email julie@IFTUK.com. For more information, go to iftuk.com.